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In Uzbekistan, this time of the year is the cotton harvest. It is also a time fraught with peril.

One warm evening this month, Safarboy Karimov was at a public meeting in the western region of Karakalpakistan where he was humiliated by government officials for not picking enough cotton. At least one official said he would be better off hanging himself if he couldn’t meet the quota.

A few days later, the father of four committed suicide. He was found hanging from a tree.

On Sept. 15, Amirbek Rakhmatov, 6, suffocated beneath a heap of raw cotton in the Bukhara region, also in western Uzbekistan. Amirbek had not gone to school that day. Instead, he went to a cotton field to help his mother, who had been “mobilized” by the government for the harvest. As she picked the white fluffy cotton balls, he climbed into a trailer and fell asleep. The other workers didn’t notice the little boy and dumped raw cotton on top of him all day.

The child’s body was found at a raw cotton storage facility.

Steve Swerdlow, a Central Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, has read and heard about these incidents. “It is very tragic but all too common,” he says.

Uzbekistan, he says, sponsors slave labour, forcing more than 2 million of its people, including children, to pick cotton every harvest for little or no pay.

“We don’t see it anywhere else in the world,” says Swerdlow. “It is very tough to escape it.”

Most of the cotton — about 70 per cent of the harvest — goes to China and Bangladesh, two of the world’s largest garment exporters.

While more than 130 apparel brands and retailers have pledged not to use Uzbek cotton, consumers can’t know for certain that the bedsheets, towels or T-shirts they buy aren’t tainted by slave labour, says Matt Fischer-Daly of the Cotton Campaign, a coalition of labour and human rights activists and agencies.

“The way you can move toward that situation is to ask the brand or retailer where the cotton is from,” says Fischer-Daly. “Let them know you can’t shop there if they don’t know where the material is from.”

National duty

Uzbekistan, once part of the former Soviet Union, is a dry, landlocked country in Central Asia. Islam Karimov, 75, has been president since 1990, having won three consecutive elections that were widely considered to have been rigged. Karimov’s Uzbekistan is infamous for its use of torture, violent suppression of dissent and persecution of human rights activists.

Uzbekistan has significant gold and uranium deposits, as well as natural gas reserves. But it has gained its notoriety from cotton.

It is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of cotton, earning $1 billion (U.S.) annually in exports to China, Turkey, Russia, the European Union and Bangladesh.

This year, Uzbekistan expects to harvest 3.35 million tonnes of cotton between September and November. Its citizens will be forced to pick the crop — as they have been since 1991.

Uzbeks must perform hashar — national duty — which the government defines as supporting the cotton harvest. Authorities force adults in the public sector — teachers, doctors, nurses — as well as vulnerable citizens and schoolchildren into the cotton fields. They are threatened with physical violence and the loss of jobs, social benefits and even their pensions. Others are threatened with public humiliation.

Those who are not “mobilized” into the fields, typically business owners, are expected to help with gas, buses and in any other way possible.

Schools and public offices can close for months, says Patricia Jurewicz, director of the Responsible Sourcing Network, which monitors global cotton production.

Harvesters live in filthy barracks without access to potable water. They miss work and school and often get sick as they try to meet daily quotas, for little — perhaps $1 a day — or no pay. Many tell of working past midnight, returning to the fields at 5 a.m.

Farmers are told to grow cotton and if they fail to meet harvest quotas they can be evicted from their land, says Jurewicz.

Fischer-Daly, who was in Uzbekistan for two weeks during last year’s cotton harvest, saw “how deeply embedded the forced labour system is. We saw local and regional officials verbally and physically abuse farmers and students.”

An International Organization for Migration report says 27 per cent of Uzbeks are labour migrants — they have “migrated to other countries to work, as they cannot take care of their families in Uzbekistan,” says Fischer-Daly.

For those left behind, there are punishments for not meeting quotas, there are beatings and arrests.

Sometimes, there are deaths.

Terrified to talk

Swerdlow was the director of the Tashkent office of Human Rights Watch until it was closed by the Uzbek government in late 2010. He says he was one of the last NGO workers to be expelled. He now lives in a neighbouring country and works hard to get information out of Uzbekistan.

It isn’t easy.

“We write our reports by talking to activists on the phone and getting videos.”

The organization published a report in January that said forced labour was widespread during the cotton harvest.

It is not clear, however, how many people die every year, Swerdlow says. “We only get fragments.”

There are suicide notes left by those who fail to meet quotas, accidents in fields, deaths from exhaustion.

Families are too terrified to talk. “They know they are being watched, they know what they say is being recorded.”

Swerdlow remembers the case of Nodir N., a university student who died after being run over by a tractor as he left a field late one evening in 2011. Although the circumstances are still unclear, witnesses reportedly said he was exhausted.

“How will this stop? Maybe with more international pressure,” says Swerdlow.

However, the companies that have signed still risk having Uzbek cotton in their products.

Tracing it from field to factory isn’t easy.

Cotton is mostly shipped from Uzbekistan to China and Bangladesh via sea routes. Once it reaches its destination, it goes to textile mills, then dyeing units and eventually to factories, where it used to produce knits, towels, denim and corduroy.

Swerdlow says NGOs are working with individual brands to closely monitor the supply chains in countries like Bangladesh, to determine whether Uzbek cotton is still finding its way into their clothing lines.

But the one way retailers can guarantee there is no Uzbek cotton in their products is by checking legal documents in their supply chain, says Fischer-Daly.

“From the trader to cotton thinner to textile manufacturer and to the cut-sew facility, companies can ensure through documents that there is no (Uzbek) cotton.”

It is feasible, he says.

Some retailers, like C&A, a Dutch fashion chain, have made it mandatory to have country of origin for all fibres on their purchase orders, says Fischer-Daly. Others have cut ties with suppliers known to use Uzbek cotton.

A couple of months ago, when news started trickling out that Bangladesh had signed an agreement with Uzbekistan under which it would buy one-third of Uzbek cotton, a group of apparel associations, including the Retail Council of Canada and the American Apparel and Footwear Association, wrote to the powerful Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association. They demanded information on what the Bangladesh association was doing “to ensure that any cotton procured through the MOU (memorandum of understanding) is free of forced labour and child labour.”

More recently, major North American and European retailers, including Walmart and J.C. Penney, vowed to boycott garments from Bangladesh if they were made from Uzbek cotton.

Except it would be hard for them to really know.

Environmental disaster

The Uzbekistan government’s pursuit of cotton profits has also caused an inland sea to almost disappear.

About 50 years ago, the Aral Sea, located between northern Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan, stretched across an area of 68,000 square kilometres and was surrounded by smaller lakes, marshes and wetlands. It was the world’s fourth-largest saline lake.

Today, it is 15 per cent of what it used to be.

The United Nations’ Environment Program calls it one of the most staggering disasters of the 20th century.

And it was completely caused by humans.

Cotton is a thirsty crop. In Uzbekistan, almost 20,000 litres of water are required for each kilogram of cotton harvested.

White Gold: The True Cost of Cotton, a recent report by the U.K.-based Environmental Justice Foundation, examined the demise of the Aral Sea.

The Aral Sea gets its water — or used to — from Amu Darya and Syr Darya, two rivers that originate in the Tajik-Afghan mountains and flow through the plains of Uzbekistan. But Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan, has withdrawn as much as 80 per cent of the water from these rivers, so nothing ever reaches the Aral Sea.

Currently Uzbekistan accounts for 56 per cent of regional water demand — primarily for the 1.47 hectares on which it cultivates cotton — yet the Environmental Justice Foundation says up to 60 per cent of water diverted for irrigation doesn’t reach the fields. Instead, it is lost in the rotting network of canals and pipes.

The death of the Aral Sea has uncovered hundreds of square kilometres of former sea floor, an area equivalent to more than 6 million football fields. What is left now is dry mud flats contaminated with salt and pesticide residues.

“There is substantial cost of cotton, including the Aral Sea,” says Miriam Diamond, a professor with the department of geography, chemical engineering and applied chemistry at the University of Toronto.

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